devtober 2025 - post-mortem
Devtober 2025 is now over and so, as is the final step of the jam, I'm going to carry out a post-mortem of my experience with the event, starting with the negatives. The game I made can be found at https://danbsh.itch.io/enkindle, and the code can be found at https://codeberg.org/danbsh/Enkindle.
what didn't go well
The main issue that I noticed was that even though one of the aims of the jam was to work on the game a little bit every day, I actually spent most of my time working in the last week of the jam.
Also, the code base of the game ended up becoming quite a mess in the end. I tried to be mindful of writing good code at the start of the jam, but as I started to add more features and the end of the jam started to approach, code quality definitely took a back-seat.
A not so important negative is that I didn't get to implement all of the features that I though of at the start of the jam. This isn't a major issue because I was still able to complete a game that was somewhat playable, but I would have like to flesh out the game's systems a bit more.
I didn't really keep-up with the dev logs over the whole jam either, which is definitely not good discipline on my part.
what went well
I think the biggest positive of the jam, is that I was able to see it through and ended up with a playable game at the end of it. It's nice to have a finished project instead of another thing that never gets finished. It's also given me some functionality that I can look at building into my own MonoGame based game engine for any future games that I make.
The jam was also a great learning experience of game development in general and what I should maybe look into before working on any other games. I think I'm going to go through Robert Nystrom's book "Game Programming Patterns", to look into better ways to implement functionality while keeping my code clean.
what next
I definitely want to take part in more game jams now that I've created a game from start to finish, and I want to continue writing dev logs for any games or projects that I work on, but with more of a technical focus. I think one thing I could have done better in my dev logs for this jam, would have been to go more in depth on the tech side of things instead of just describing what I had done.